Staccato Rhythm

Staccato Rhythm is a very rapid and continuous stream of motion and tone like machine gun fire or a rapid drum beat. In class I like to use the example of 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1……… to make the point.

This pattern applied to fighting movement is a fighting rhythm because there is a pattern and all parties know when the next strike and the one after it will occur and the person using this pattern can mostly rest their mind because it is a pattern.

This pattern acts like a Broken rhythm because it is overwhelming and after a very brief period of time the person using the Staccato rhythm will get tired out. Staccato movement will tend to overwhelm the opponent which is something that a Broken Rhythm tends to do as well. A simple way to see this is to have your partner perform a reasonably complex (not simple abc, abc, abc type) pattern in the air and then the partner practicing the Staccato rhythm rapidly runs letting their feet make sound and hits their chest with their open hands making sound and moves very close to the partner performing the rhythm. As long as the partner performing the rhythmic motion is performing a complex enough rhythm then the tendency will be for their movement to get interrupted which may show as a speed up or slowing down or simply interrupted movement on the part of the person trying to maintain a rhythm.

Kun Tao tends to use Staccato Rhythm in its movement and there are quite a few fighting patterns that are trained in our style of Clear’s Kun Tao Silat using Staccato Rhythm.